First and foremost – a big, huge, overly enthusiastic congrats to Ryan and Rebecca on their nuptials Friday evening. We missed the ceremony itself (late sitter) but showed up early to the reception at Boulevard Brewery. What a sweet place to hold a function and get friends and family together. So, good luck to you both (and thanks for sitting us at the NYC table – we really enjoyed meeting your East Coast homies).

Saturday night, Night of the Living Dead at the Coterie. Awesome. Just fun and perfect Halloween goodness since we didn’t get to put on our Horror Film Fest this year (but oh! next year!). Made me really think about adapting Night of the Mullets for the stage for next Halloween.

Yesterday, pumpkin patch in Gardner. Full-fledged agritourism. Lots of fun for the kiddies. And an ATM for the adults.

In other news, baby girl is kicking and flipping. Perhaps her name will be Ninja Gaiden?

I don’t know how many of you saw this film in the theater, but I sure wish I had. Outside of it being about 20 minutes too long – what a swell flick. Great music (I’ve had April March stuck in my head all week), great action, fun dialogue.

In other news,

Per my bad arse wife:

“Iâ€™ve seen the commercials for this d-bagâ€™s church. Whatâ€™s really amazing in the article are the dollar amounts quoted. Thatâ€™s a massive amount of money to essentially simply run a church. Their actual social programs are almost non-existent but their youth and conversion programs Iâ€™m sure get a TON of that 17 million dollars a year.”

The numbers quoted in the article are indeed staggering, not just budgetary, but membership numbers. Who said god is dead? Nietzsche and Trent…your mouths are duly stuffed with feets. God ain’t dead. He’s living phat in JOCO. I’m not posting the article to debate the merits/lack of merits for megachurches…just find it interesting to see the numbers laid out before me.

Yes, metalheads. AKA: headbangers, rockers, thrashers, hessians…you know, black band shirt, jeans, boot-wearing, ass-stomping, (mostly young, white, male, tatooed) fans of the RAAAAWWWWWK! I was this {} close to joining their ranks last night for Down’s concert at The Beaumont Club. My bro IM’ed me yesterday PM to say he had a spare ticket. Never one to turn down a free show (even for a band whose musical styles are far from my typical tastes) I said I’d meet him at the bar at 8PM.
8PM rolls around and the night seems nice for having my ears assaulted. Walking up to the front of the club, the line of metalheads creeps waaaay down Pennsylvania. I call my bro and he tells me he’s at the front of the line at the rear entrance. So I head down through the parking garage. Rawk and the smell of burning nugs escape from many open car windows. The line at the back is no shorter and even harder to manipulate due to close quarters. I call my bro again and tell him I’ll wait up front while he gets the tix.
And the rawkers keep pouring in. Surprisingly, they’re a mellow bunch at this stage of the game. A few drunkards singing in their best gutteral imitation of some band they love. A few titty comments directed at ladies having to walk to end of the block in order to get in line. I watch the line and listen to the metalheads and get excited thinking about how nuts it’s gonna get inside when the music starts. I like that about metalheads. They’re not afraid to move (or punch/push/kick/bite/headbutt/jump/scream) once that band begins to play. I like that a lot. I was once at a Danzig show where standing next to me on the floor of Memorial Hall was a monster of a man, Samoan I would guess. And looking at him, I would have never guessed he could move like he did. But when little, bitty Glenn Danzig came out and wailed like Elvis’s demonic counterpart, this dude plowed his way through the crowd to hop into the pit and bounced around singing every word and taking hit after hit. People just started throwing themselves into him – he was like a cushy, moving wall. They’d bounce off him, two or three at a time even. He just keep moving and rawkin’ and singing, pulling himself out for a few minutes to catch his breath…and then jumping right back into the thick of it all.
And I like that willingness to give oneself over to the music.
Then my bro rang…will-call didn’t have the tix and they were having to buy them. Did I want one? Nope. As much as I like the metalhead concert ethos, I really don’t want to pay to have a metalhead band physically damage my hearing.
I talked to my bro today. He said the show was sweet. 2 hour set, no opening act. Pure RAWK.

The temperature was perfect, slighty overcast, with crisp, clean air – even through the Bottoms. Legs cranking with ease, enjoying working the creaks out from a relaxing weekend…deep breathes in, out…it’s such a change for a Monday morn to be so pleasant and refreshing and downright enjoy-SPLASH! a car flies by, sending up a wave of water as high as my head – and which subsequently curls and crashes all over me. Nothing like being force-fed West Bottoms standing water to wake one from a dream that Monday mornings can be OK.

This weekend, we discovered the utter awesomeness of digital over-the-air television broadcasting. We had sitting in our breakfast nook a 13″ television hooked up to a pair of rabbit ears. Fine for watching the news in the AM, and some PBS over supper. Every channel required an antennae adjustment. Even then, fuzzy reception all around. So, on a whim, we decided to replace that TV with a HDTV. Crikey! We had no idea what we were missing. Not only are all our over-the-air channels now completely crisp and clear with no adjustments necessary…we have 4 different options for programming on Channel 19! Saturday night, 19-1 was showing some British brouhaha – so I flipped over to 19-2 and watched The Decemberists on Austin City Limits. Don’t know how we slept on this technology for so long – probably because we really don’t give much thought to TV. But, damn, what a difference.

Last night.Zoo.
Yes, horse fuckers. (Hate to think what kinda traffic that’ll drive my way.)
Interesting.
Not compelling (though I give it props for effort and capturing the beauty of Seattle).
Worth your time?
That depends.
The director states this about the film’s conceit: “This was a guy who was a conservative man at one point, and those ideas started breaking down for him. I think that 9/11 triggered a lot of it. But he was [also] in the center of one of the most secretive military complexes. Meanwhile, he listened to a lot of left-wing radio, he questioned everything our government was involved in, and he was ethically conflicted about his job and the money he was making. That’s the core fascination for me.” None of that at all came across to me. There’s a single moment where the gentlemen in question has a breakdown of sorts and starts rattling some jibberish but there’s not much context for what that is or why.
Another item to positively comment on is the interesting way in which the documentary is put together. The film is narrated by the actual people involved in the incident, yet the on-screen action is played out by actors. Sort of like an art-house dramatization, like Unsolved Mysteries with horse fucking.